Thank you all very much, first of all, to the presenters who have already spoken for your presentations.
Thank you, Marcel, for also being here.
I'll let you quickly introduce yourself, yes, because you don't have a talk.
But this is the panel, how is it called, a European strategy for technological sovereignty.
I think that's about what I wrote into the proposal, at least.
Yeah, I'll just hand the microphone quickly to Marcel, because he didn't have the opportunity of introducing himself.
Thank you, Sebastian. Thank you for the invitation.
For this fantastic session.
My name is Marcel Kolaya.
I should pick up, I guess.
My name is Marcel Kolaya.
I am an European policy and advocacy director at Access Now, which is an organization that defends and extends digital rights for people and communities at risk.
But I am here more, I think, rather in the capacity, more private one from my previous life.
Which is when I was a member of the European Parliament.
And I focused on the digital agenda of the European Union, including, of course, free and open source software,
because also myself, a free and open source software, fan from my studies, times already.
I'm a computer scientist by training, so that's my background.
Thank you so much, Marcel.
The leading question that I've sent to Marcel, so I'm sorry.
The rest of the panel is a bit in disadvantage when it comes to that.
But I also try to introduce that at the beginning of the session.
We're facing international competition in Europe and at the same time, Europe and all of us,
we depend so much on key digital services and products to be provided from outside the EU.
So, do you think open source can help reduce these dependencies?
Who'd I start with? Maybe from the hardware perspective, because that's one that we don't hear too much.
Yes, thank you.
And so, for those of you who missed my presentation, I was making the point that, by leveraging open source,
not only open source instruction sets, like what you find in RIS5, but open source core designs,
or SLC design system on the chip designs that are available from the open hardware foundation,
that you can make up at least part of that gap.
And the reason for that is, of course, that general compute is now a commodity.
And this means by leveraging those existing building blocks,
then you can build something more advanced on the top and so innovate and catch up and even overtake those external forces.
Of course, this requires proper software support at the same time.
So, open hardware foundation, that's not something I covered in the talk,
but has a complete software task group that will provide the compilers,
linkers, everything that you need to leverage those, and then there's the broader eclipse,
ecosystem, of course, with many European companies in there that produce software that can be leveraged for embedded,
for IoT, for SDV and so many other things.
Yeah, I'm very happy with this question, because I've been thinking about this for a long long time,
and so as we are now basically having 17 or 18x and the rectives, regulating data, data space, cloud edge, chips, AI,
sort of, I think the one thing that we don't regulate and the wallet, of course, are important.
The one thing that we don't regulate is the phone.
So, I want to European phone, 500 million so on European phone.
We can make it 6G because 6G is coming in 2030.
We can have our edge as cloud, so we just run everything on the local cloud,
because the cloud is the edge of 500 million phones.
We embed the wallet in our own hardware, which we fully control our supply chain,
which we don't, which we don't do not now.
And we're also lowering cryptographic credentials because we are now,
because basically, Apple and Google are talking about how they would like to see the wallet being
cryptographically addressed.
To me, that makes no sense.
So, if you regulate all the things above, and you forget to regulate,
basically, the only thing you have to regulate, which is the phone,
which you can control what goes in, what goes out,
the simple Steve Jobs, he did it with the iPhone.
I think that's the way to go forward.
We can then embed not only media wisdom, so we can give that phone a different look for 12 year olds
and 16 year olds.
We can stop talking about negotiating things.
I think I remember a three, three months ago from Breton,
where he was very happy that he got one feature from TikTok removed,
which I thought was a bit of doing it to be happy about really sort of,
if that's our agency.
So our agency should go deeper, it should be a phone, 500 million phone.
Where we implement our value system, where we don't try to negotiate 15 regulations
with 100 people supplying that.
And I think the idea is ripe to lend.
Marcel, do we already have a European phone?
How can we get one?
That's a good question.
Maybe I will take it in a bit broader way,
because I got really inspired by all these presentations that we have here.
We have listened to today and that we have seen very interesting examples
about how we can actually catch up.
And I really liked how we could look into also the past
where Europe missed the train already in the 60s.
I think it was the day in the 60s.
And now what are we going to do to catch up now?
And if we speak about open source,
and we speak about digital sovereignty, or text sovereignty,
which is the topic of this panel,
then the main question is, what a digital sovereignty is,
because different people will tell you different things about what they think it is,
and therefore they have different solutions on how to achieve it.
What I have been saying already from the beginning when this type of code
word begins spreading in the Brussels bubble was,
well, I want digital sovereignty through collaboration.
And I'm now trying to go back to the original question.
I'm not trying to escape.
And that I think is kind of the solution.
And to also tight back to what we have seen in the presentations.
If we use open technologies,
then we can actually leverage this advantage of collaboration,
and we can actually leapfrog to today,
and by using open technologies,
yes, we can probably at some point also have a European phone,
because to catch up with building all these chip makers here
in Europe and trying to agree on the instruction sets
between the German one and French one,
as we heard in the presentation,
it's probably going to be very difficult.
So using more open source, both in hardware and software,
I think is a way forward, and telephone,
I think is just one of the examples.
It's not like something that is so specific
that it should work differently than in any other areas.
No, but just one quick, very quickly.
I think, let's say, sovereignty is the agency
to implement your value system.
That to me is sovereignty.
And so you need to implement Europe as a 500 million zone.
We should be able to implement our value system.
We have all the X, so instead of trying to ask others,
please comply with these X,
and have compliance and fines as the only tools.
I think time is ripe too, basically,
because we have the chips.
We have the A's and our chips.
We can run AI off the chips.
We can run operating systems from the chips.
We have a full blown 1500 NG high open source project zone,
in which we have our own search systems.
I mean, friends, searching, shopping is not rocket science,
right?
It's simply implementing some database structures.
So, yes, it should never have come this far.
It has come this far now, and now we should find,
we should, I think, try to get to the one level,
which we can build agency,
and that's on this phone.
And the horizon is 60 phone, I think, is very logical.
And one thing worked remembering,
if you think this is not possible, remember Nokia.
Europe was leading in the past in that domain,
and can get back leadership again.
Yes, and Nokia is leading the 60 work program
at the moment, also, for the commission.
So, Nokia and everything.
And maybe to add something on a more fundamental level,
like stepping away again from the concrete example
we've been talking about.
I think open source itself is, you know,
how to say that it just is,
like we know the terms of using it,
and honestly, the open source community,
as we can see on events like this,
it's hugely driven by Europeans already.
So, just by adopting open source,
we have so much talent in Europe,
that is driving a lot of these softwares,
so just adopting open source naturally gets us,
you know, into clear terms of what software usage is,
or how we can modify it,
and then, you know,
move on if we have to.
So, yeah.
Thank you very much.
Maybe if I can stay with you too,
for a moment, you were saying that,
because, sorry,
but the key word that I heard was Nokia,
and I don't think that phones is now really the,
the type of work that,
that earns them at rather standards and patterns,
so I got to the idea of asking you,
because it was saying that a lot of future work
will require standardization to also come in,
what do open source projects need in order to be included
under standardization,
or, I mean, a lot of the open source software
is essentially already informal standard implementations.
From your perspective,
what would you say,
could you do to make it easier for open source
to get into that place,
to either join standardization bodies,
or to be accepted as the informal standards?
Yeah, something.
I mean, just in regards to what we were talking about already,
we try to show a picture,
that there are already standard mechanisms that you can use,
but it's really about how you put those to use.
You need to have a system that encourages that,
that says that there is already the tool
that technology already exists,
but you need to have that support system in place
that says that make this a standardization,
so it can spread and grow itself naturally.
So without that, it's going to be really, really hard.
Even if you have the best tools,
if you don't apply them,
you can't do much without it, really.
And then there's greater engagement
from open source organizations like us
into standardization bodies,
because as a thing,
those two communities were living in parallel
and the traditional model for ISO, I see,
and all of that was selling paper literally.
So you had to buy those very thick
specifications or standards in order to implement them,
and that's what they were doing.
Now there is something at ISOICGTC1,
joint technical committee 1,
that's called the publicly available
specification process, okay, or pass.
And essentially an organization like Eclipse,
and authors can join or obtain special status,
and then we can transpose our open specifications
into international standards,
and we've started doing that at Eclipse,
and authors are so, I wouldn't pretend
that we are unique from that perspective,
but you see slowly those two things melding,
and of course this means that now we have the
asons with various technical committees
that sense and elect from a European perspective,
for example, and all of that.
And so the trick here,
if you are a member of the open source community,
you can join the standardization community too,
and this just means you need to be a member
on a mirror committee in your home country.
I am myself from my country,
and this means then you get to participate,
to have a voice into that.
And so if more people from the open source ecosystem do that,
then we can make our voices heard,
because it's not that old-style standards people don't care
about open source,
but maybe they are not even aware that this is a thing
of how important it is.
If you are in the room with them,
and if you do a part of the work with them,
then of course you can inject this open source
and know how in the process the proceedings.
Yeah, so you are afraid.
Yeah.
You want to ask something?
Yeah.
I think a very important aspect is as well
on the grassroots aspect of it.
The looking at what the tech community in Europe is doing,
what has shown where it has proven itself to be working,
and like we mentioned, for example,
this platform engineering discipline that is basically emerging
within IT organizations and looking at these things,
and then interacting with the communities
with the practitioners of IT,
as I think the important bit where basically you can build,
you know, living standards that interact with these
practitioners, practitioners of what they are doing
and evolving around that.
A colleague of mine always reminds me that I should ask
if you can participate in standardization bodies,
because there are not many people,
I'm sorry, I'm off camera,
but you will know in a second why.
So do participate in standardization bodies if you can.
There are not a lot of people that know what open source is
and how it works in standardization bodies.
So do carry that kind of information into the body's
miracle.
Sorry, but I wasn't going to take audience questions,
but you raise your hand,
specifically on the topics of standards.
I think you have something to say.
I actually don't want to disagree with anything.
I totally agree what you said about the past process.
We're doing the same with the foundation
with open chain and others,
so it's a good way to get open source specifications into
the higher outcomes.
But I would like to challenge to group a little bit
going back to the question you raised, I think,
because let's keep one thing in mind
and that is if we publish open technologies,
they're available to anybody for any purpose.
This doesn't improve our competitiveness as such.
It increases everybody's competitiveness.
So one question I ask if we talk about.
The phone of Europe, the other product is
who is going to build these products?
And if we have companies that emerge in build these products,
how do you make sure they don't get bored
once they're successful by the same people
that are currently dominating the market?
Thanks, I want to answer that question specifically
because I was a member of the European Parliament
and therefore I kind of have sort of a footprint
also on the regulation that I think rightfully
can be bashed, of course.
But there was one point in one of the presentations.
I don't exactly remember who said it,
but we don't necessarily need less regulation.
We need better regulation.
And I need to tell you that it was very often really frustrating
to see that we, as Europe, don't really have a strategy.
That's the major problem.
So I think this whole thing,
and I think it's very important to understand
that's the major problem.
So I think this whole session and this panel discussion
is really on the right topic,
like we really need to have a strategy
because if we don't have one,
then we have various pieces of very contradictory
type of initiatives or regulations
that in the end don't make sense.
If you look at Interoperable Europe webpage
of the European Commission,
you may get the idea that,
well, the Commission actually knows what they are doing.
They know a lot about open source
and true there are people that know a lot about open source
in the European Commission.
But then you look at some other proposals
from the Commission, legislative ones,
some of them were people discussed today in this room
like the Cyber Resilience Act,
the product liability directive,
all of them I worked on,
the last one was not discussed today.
But in all of them,
I had to fight for an exception for open source
because the policy makers didn't understand
what is specific about open source
and what, well,
they don't understand what is upstream and downstream
that's the main problem.
And to explain this to the policy makers
is very difficult.
So I'm really glad that we can have
this session also to motivate a bit,
you know, people to also get in touch,
you know, with the policy makers.
But to your question,
I think we need a strategy,
and I think we need a better policy making,
so we have better regulation.
As a matter of fact, the big tech
is not over-regulated.
It's heavily undregulated.
That's why we have the Digital Markets Act
that tries to fix that,
but also I think it's,
we were not ambitious enough.
I have, for instance, proposed
mandatory interoperability for
a big social networks platforms.
So that the smaller ones,
like master non-for instance,
can become interoperable with.
I have also proposed the chat platform
interoperability,
which fortunately got into the law.
So there may be we can get some movement.
So that this, what that gentleman has had said,
is not happening that basically
startups do not really work well
in Europe,
and they work much better in the US.
We just need better regulation.
We need to incentivize startups.
We need a strategy for funding of open source.
We need to understand,
actually, which open source is used
where in the critical infrastructure
in the public infrastructure,
we need to find a way
how to fund security
for these open source components.
Remember, of exeutils
backdoor,
for those who don't know
that it was a backdoor
that got into a library
then through which subsequently,
basically through a private key
that was implanted there,
the attacker could get
basically to virtually all servers running
SSH.
That is the biggest,
basically a backdoor,
massively deployed everywhere
on the internet.
Because we don't have a strategy
how to fund security
of critical open source projects.
So I think these are pieces
of the solution that I would say
to your question or answer to a question.
What do we actually do
that what this gentleman said,
you know,
is not happening.
I have a couple more questions,
but I already see that some,
no, you're great.
We are,
we still have ten minutes left.
So I think I'll open it up to questions
from the audience.
You've already raised your hand
right about to be with you
and then I'll take more questions.
So you can already try and think
about how we achieve this
that we're discussing about.
Sorry for being now a little bit critical.
Of course,
we're talking about the digital sovereignty
problem by redefining
different sovereignty as many times
over until it's no problem anymore.
But let me say,
digital sovereignty is about
the ability to act.
So it's about power.
Right?
And we've seen
that economy has been weaponized.
Right?
And there's something the Europeans didn't do.
So, and it's not a startup problem,
because it's no startup that challenges Europe.
These are,
they have been through a startup sometime,
but they're not anymore.
So Facebook,
the big players, Microsoft, Amazon,
there are no startups anymore.
Right?
But they are dominating,
and the problem is they can be weaponized
because some of the Western,
or some of the countries out there
is not only Western,
but they have weaponized their citizens.
They can basically turn every citizen
by law into a weapon,
by commanding him to do stuff.
And that's the problem.
What we need in Europe is
we need execution,
which means we need companies.
But that means we have companies.
We need to recognize them.
And then,
when it comes to state money,
we need to buy from them,
and not from the others.
Thank you.
How is the game show called
where you have to put the answer
in type of a question?
Please,
if you have questions,
formulate them as questions,
but maybe you want to react.
Yeah, very quickly.
So,
what we see is that basically,
not of the regions has had a good response
for the wave of connectivity of the past 50 years.
So, started with the internet,
TCPRP pass on the packet.
That was something alien on the planet,
and it went like wildfire.
Then, around 2000,
we got the cloud.
So, everything was a demo,
but now they cloud hit
and then all of the other things.
So, in China,
the politicians were engineers,
computer scientists,
and they understood perfectly this new hybrid territory.
So, they would deep-spec packet inspection,
they built their bubble.
In the bubble,
they run infrastructure services applications,
which I think is brilliant.
But, of course,
they are a bit obsessive-compulsive
when it comes to control.
So, that system is not stable in the long run.
It's cybernetically unstable,
because it's too much stars is in the system.
This wave hit the US
through the entrepreneurial model.
So, basically,
we have 7 trillion,
which is gaffer in hands of 10 individuals.
It's also another stable system.
It's not just that Europe was sort of not looking,
nobody was looking.
Everybody's building their response,
but all the responses so far are not adequate.
In Europe,
basically, we had a legal response.
Why? Because, again,
if you look at the new commission,
basically the vast majority of the commission are lawyers.
Then, there's a few journalists and business consultants,
and there's only one physicist that is running defense.
This is not adequate.
We don't really need this expertise at that moment
or running kind of being steering the ship.
So, what we need to do is to first of all,
I think, with the strategy,
is try to get a better balance between the lawyers
and the computer scientists and the engineers.
But, we basically need engineers
in the steering room at this moment.
We need this community on the table as equals.
Not just as people doing small things,
because everybody was doing small things
until they become big things.
But it's just to say that it's not just Europe.
We didn't have a proper response.
No one had a proper response.
The name of a game show
where you have to give the answer in the form of a question.
What is jeopardy?
So, in the form of a question,
what do we want?
Do we want companies like Google Facebook in Europe
because a lot of lamentation seems to be
oh, where are the tech companies in Europe?
And I'm happy we don't have Google here,
or Facebook being European?
If the previous one is a person said,
oh, if you're going to make everything open source,
what strategy do we have?
What is this strategy or what is the vision
for what kind of entrepreneurial
or market society we want?
Do we want big companies if we want small ones?
What kind of support are we willing to offer?
Thanks for that question.
Basically, on that round,
I also wanted to challenge the previous question,
which was not completely a question.
Sorry, because I really don't think that we want
the European Google and European meta and European
other big tech companies,
because they are,
so huge extent,
arguably, part of the problem.
That's why the Digital Market Act was created,
not because these companies are American,
but because these companies concentrate so much power,
and we can see today on social networks
when Musk acquired Twitter and now Musk
effectively became part of the US government.
I mean, we can see how these big tech companies
are inherently problematic
if they are not properly regulated.
And we also see how difficult it is
to regulate these huge,
big tech corporations.
So I think that we should rather,
and specifically, I think in this room,
I think that someone has to say this,
we need more decentralized economy
of companies that offer decentralized,
interoperable solutions that can be built upon
and then you can have innovation on top of this
interoperability.
That is what I would also like to see
as a strategy for digital sovereignty of Europe.
And then of course,
this applies to software
from the hardware perspective,
you should think about chips.
Of course,
there you cannot do it in a decentralized way
because the capital investments,
also you,
you cannot have a small scale semiconductor
factory that would be profitable.
So then the key there are
either public, private partnerships
or multinational,
or even European level consortia
that will invest into the proper infrastructure
and then be shared,
maybe with smaller players.
Because those kind of investments,
you won't find the billions of euros
that you need to get a new factory
with a cutting edge process of the ground like that.
And this is not something that scales down.
So then you need to have the proper pool of resources
and money and public support
to make that happen.
The good news is that there are plenty of large
organisations in Europe already
with that kind of expertise.
But if you don't want a single one
or a small group of them to control the market,
then you need maybe to channel public investments
in a way where you will have shared resources
that smaller, fabulous fondries could use,
for example, to get smaller batches of chips
made, why still being profitable, for example.
That's harder, let's say, than the sort of side of things,
but this is necessary as well,
because otherwise you will get one or two big companies
that will sell chips and then you get
into the same type of semi monopoly
or oligarchy that you will use
currently in the market.
Thank you very much.
There was another question in the audience.
Yep.
So there is a matter of, okay,
so free and open source means a user choice,
essentially boils down to the freedom,
the definition of free software blah blah.
So in that sense, regulating the phone market,
regulating the industry,
regulating CPUs and everything.
Boils down to not essentially forcing users
to make the choice between open source technologies.
Like, my mother uses windows,
my girlfriend uses windows,
my father uses windows.
He's a girlfriend uses windows.
And they actively make the choice to use windows
instead of Linux.
I've talked them about Linux.
I've showed them Linux and they have chosen
with their own free capacity as humans.
And adults to use windows.
He's a proprietary software.
So in the end to use proprietary phones,
they don't care about their freedom,
essentially.
They have chosen to not choose as effectively.
And in that sense,
it's not a matter of regulation,
it's a matter of steering,
public opinion towards free and open source.
And it's also a matter of not forcing them
and regulating them to use things.
Because then it's not free and open source.
It's more of a source available.
Men philosophy for using free and open source products,
effectively,
which goes against the idea of free software and
of open software.
So how would you tackle this problem?
I know,
I have to praise it as a question rather than
go on a deep monologue about life experiences.
So how would be the best way to tackle with the idea of
not betraying free software and open source software?
What would be a good way to promote something
that does not make money?
And so that people will not look,
how would the people in the European Union look
forward to promoting this kind of stuff?
So my answer to that is simple.
Why is Windows the dominant operating system?
Because they have money?
No.
Because at that point in history,
people wanted to run specific apps on it.
Okay.
It was Windows versus OS 2 at a some point
and people picked Windows because you
had office on it and other things that the other didn't.
So if you want to promote open source,
build a better phone on open source technologies
or build a better product.
And then people want to have to understand open source.
That's the key thing.
Often in the open source community,
we have a tendency to embarrass ourselves
into big debates about semantics and all of that
about labor versus open versus whatever.
When in the end,
end users don't care and will never care.
And that's the type of problem that we have
at the eclipse foundation as well
in the Linux foundation and not your bodies.
In the sense,
if I need to explain what open source is
in order to get a member,
my job is incrementally more difficult
than getting them to adopt a specific piece of technology.
So I shouldn't have to explain that.
Not that it doesn't matter.
It matters.
And a lot.
But it matters to me as a deeply embedded person
in the open source community,
not to the outside world.
So build a better product.
All right.
There were a couple more questions.
We're also running into the wrap-up time.
So I'm already thinking of what I might say
to wrap this up.
But please be very succinct with your question.
So my question is restricted
to public sector procurement.
Although I'm thinking of the bureau,
but it applies to all of you,
which is,
do you think that a single strategy
of public procurement,
which centers on,
avoiding at all costs,
vendor lock-in,
and having technology,
limitation of ten years,
which means that every ten years
you had to make the full switch,
migration and so on,
would be enough to make the switch
to open source.
That's a good question.
I can just at least say something.
But I,
I honestly don't think that is enough,
mostly because
this procurement process should reflect our values,
and maybe some kind of restrictions like that
are part of that because of our values,
but that goes again to this social change,
to this cultural change,
of accepting and knowing these things as important.
So I think that that has to be part of it
for the,
like a different procurement process
to be accepted by,
you know, society.
Oh, sorry.
And then maybe it's the good time
to come back to the notion
that we had this afternoon of
common good and common goods in the sense
that, of course,
if there's public money going into anything,
then it makes sense that
the public, so to speak,
the taxpayer or the citizen,
if I take a higher view there,
should have something in return, right?
And from that perspective,
well, this would involve probably
changes in the way that governments do
tenders and things like that.
But certainly having this notion of
something given back by the winners
to the community or to,
to the citizens that are funding them,
could be an interesting idea to consider.
And of course you have to
change a lot of things for that to happen.
But that's probably one of the ways
where governments have the power to do something.
Thank you so much,
dear panelists.
Unfortunately, there's no more time for
more questions.
But I'm sure these guys are going to be
around for a couple of minutes.
Maybe in the room,
preferably outside of the room if you have questions.
And now to wrap this whole session up,
this was about increasing the competitiveness of Europe.
And while we have heard that we won't find
billions lying around on the street to create
tips factories,
maybe we do find some money lying around in the EU budget,
because not only is the reform of the public
procurement directive coming up,
where we definitely should in incentivize
governments and administrations to publish,
and then also make sure that it's public code,
because if they're investing into software,
if they're buying software,
that should also benefit the whole of Europe.
And that goes through investing
into European technology through
your open source.
We have heard that we can manage to
make businesses in Europe that are mostly SMEs
when it comes to IT sector,
work together on projects using open source
as a development philosophy,
as a business model.
And maybe eventually,
in about two years' time in the summer,
we will have the discussions starting
about the next long-term,
seven-year budget of the European Union.
Maybe there is someone in there
that can actually be put to good use
to increase our competitiveness,
and to realize the strategic value of open source.
My two cents on that.
Thank you so much, panel.
Thank you for everybody to meet here.